PETALING JAYA: A PKR MP has chided Malaysia for its terrible performance on gender equality, citing the country’s current rank of 112 out of 156 countries in the 2021 Global Gender Gap report.
“Even among Asia-Pacific nations, we are behind Brunei, Myanmar, China and Cambodia,” said Kuantan MP Fuziah Salleh at a press conference organised by Wanita PKR to launch its national gender action plan at the party headquarters here today.
“Why are we performing so poorly despite the government’s women’s development action plans and commitments to ratify international conventions?” asked Fuziah.
Malaysia fell eight places, from its 104th position in the 2020 report.
She said that although the country faced obstacles to realising its gender equality goals, they were not being resolved diligently by the government.
While Fuziah complimented the finance ministry for planning to introduce gender-responsive and participatory budgeting (GRPB) in the 2022 budget, she highlighted that Malaysia lacked the data needed to execute GRPB, which would aid in the formulation of gender-mainstreaming policies.
“In order to do GRPB, we must look at our data management system. The statistics department must gather data from existing databases that are scattered over various government agencies that look into women and family welfare.
“The prime minister spoke about big data. It is time to commit to this in the 2022 budget by allocating funds for better data collection,” she said.
At the same event, PKR MP Nor Azrina Surip said the government must quickly table the bill on sexual harassment and anti-stalking.
Nor Azrina questioned whether the government had the political will to look into the matter.
“There seems to be a lack of political will in the current government to expedite the tabling of the bill on sexual harassment and anti-stalking. We often get unsatisfactory answers from the government whenever we raise these matters in Parliament,” said the Merbok MP.